His name’s stitched on a tag above his pocket, close enough to read. I don’t use it. I take the bag and go, and by the time the bell rings shut behind me, I’m already someone he won’t remember clearly enough to describe.
Outside, the cold’s sharper than it was going in. I set the bag on the passenger seat and don’t get in.
There’s the version of the glamour that runs under everything, all day, without me spending a thought on it—the one that’s kept people’s eyes slipping past me for as long as I can remember. And there’s the other version. The one I have to reach for and hold; the solid one.
I reach for it now, standing there in the cold. I pull it in tight until I’m little more than a vague sensation—a shape nobody’s eyes catch on, a shadow on a street where everyone’s got somewhere else to be.
I cut down the side of the building onto the service road behind the row of stores—empty and gray, exactly where I was told to be.
I wait.
You could still get back in the van. Drive up the mountain. Never send another word.
They’d know inside a day. Serenity would be the one who paid for it. That’s always the end of that thought.
The phone buzzes against my ankle.
They know I’m here. That’s the first thing that lands—standing alone on an empty road with the phone already going off beforeI’ve done anything anyone could have seen. I dig it out and put it to my ear.
“I’m here,” I say. “Like you told me.”
“We know.” Same voice. Flat, no color in it, the way it’s always been. But there’s something wrong under it, and it takes me a second to place it, because it isn’t a threat this time, and it isn’t a demand, and in all this time the voice has never once been anything else.
There’s no ask.
“I brought—”
“There’s nothing we need.”
“The meeting,” I say. “You told me to come. To go over what I’ve—”
“You’ve done everything we needed you to do, Grace.” A pause. “Truly.”
Truly.
My hand goes tight around the phone. This is wrong. Something’s wrong.
“When do I hear from you?” It comes out thinner than I mean it to.
“You won’t need to.”
The line dies in my ear.
I stand there with the phone still against my face, and I understand, in the flat, ordinary way you understand very bad things, that whatever just happened wasn’t the end of a conversation.
It was the end of me being useful to them.
Serenity.
The voice was the only thread I had to her—thin, ugly, built out of coercion, but a thread. If they’ve cut me loose, I don’t know what that means for her except that it can’t be anything good. I shove the phone into my jeans pocket and try to figure out what comes next.
Shit.
I hear the step.
Not behind me. Ahead, where the service road opens onto the lot.
A man stands there. He isn’t moving fast. He’s just there, filling the gap between the buildings. He knew I’d be standing here. He picked his spot so I couldn’t get past him without going through him. The glamour might mask me to a degree, but it’s not going to help me do that.
